Have A Coke and A Smile

Coke has been around for a really long time. (See the story below) It’s everywhere including at my house and office. Famous people like Warren Buffet, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and Santa Clause drink it. And their advertising is iconic and has evolved nicely over the years. Those two red background ads under Santa Clause say a lot without saying much. On the left it says Coke goes with food (Yes!!) and on the right they introduce their new tall can. Below those ads, is a clever billboard campaign in Italy using the Coke ribbon morphing into a hand to show us way to recycling bins. At the bottom, Coca-Cola Australia ran a campaign in 2019 using a lady bug and some helpful ants to promote their use of 100% recycled plastic. See their really cute commercial HERE. Bottoms up!!!

Now that the thermometer is rising, nothing for me says “summer’s here” like ice cold Coca Cola (well, ok, plus hot dogs, barbeque chicken, potato salad, ice cream, watermelon, lemonade   helps a bit too).  With all of the different drinks on the market, flavored waters, teas, seltzers, sports drinks and more, sometimes I just love the taste of a Coke with vanilla ice cream for a great float (throw in some Mickey D’s fries and I’m good to go!).  I did some digging online and found out some fun facts (like the guy who invented it started to advertise on this day in 1886).  Enjoy the info and fun trivia and pop open a Coke over the weekend and smile for your friends at KHT!

  1. John Stith Pemberton was an American biochemist and American Civil War veteran who is best known as the inventor of Coca-Cola.
  2.  Pemberton was born on July 8, 1831, in Knoxville, Georgia, and spent most of his childhood in Rome, Georgia. His parents were James C. Pemberton and Martha L. Gant.  The Pembertons were of English lineage, the direct paternal ancestor Phineas Pemberton and his family from Lancashire, traveled aboard the ship Submission about 1682 from Liverpool to the Province of Maryland, eventually settling in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  There he built a mansion in 1687 and had served as William Penn’s chief administrator.
  3. Stith Pemberton entered the Reform Medical College of Georgia in Macon, Georgia, and in 1850, at the age of nineteen, he earned his medical degree.  His main talent was chemistry. After initially practicing some medicine and surgery, Dr. Pemberton opened a drug store in Columbus.
  4. During the American Civil War, Pemberton served in the Third Cavalry Battalion of the Georgia State Guard, which was at that time a component of the Confederate Army. He achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel.
  5. He met Ann Eliza Clifford Lewis of Columbus, Georgia, known to her friends as “Cliff”, who had been a student at the Wesleyan College in Macon. They were married in Columbus in 1853. Their only child, Charles Ney Pemberton, was born in 1854.
  6. In April 1865, Dr. Pemberton sustained a saber wound to the chest during the Battle of Columbus. He soon became addicted to the morphine used to ease his pain and soon began seeking a cure for his addiction.
  7. His first recipe was “Dr. Tuggle’s Compound Syrup of Globe Flower”, in which the active ingredient was derived from the buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), a toxic plant that is common in Alaska.  He next began experimenting with coca and coca wines, eventually creating a recipe that contained extracts of kola nut and damiana, which he called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca.
  8. According to Coca-Cola historian Phil Mooney, Pemberton’s world-famous soda was “created in Columbus, Georgia and carried to Atlanta”.  With public concern about drug addiction, depression, and alcoholism among war veterans, and “neurasthenia” among “highly-strung” Southern women, Pemberton’s “medicine” was advertised as particularly beneficial for “ladies, and all those whose sedentary employment causes nervous prostration”.
  9. In 1886, when Atlanta and Fulton County enacted temperance legislation, Pemberton had to produce a non-alcoholic alternative to his French Wine Coca.  Pemberton relied on Atlanta drugstore owner-proprietor Willis E. Venable to test, and help him perfect, the recipe for the beverage, which he formulated by trial and error. With Venable’s assistance, Pemberton worked out a set of directions for its preparation.
  10. He blended the base syrup with carbonated water by accident when trying to make another glassful of the beverage. Pemberton decided then to sell this as a fountain drink rather than a medicine. Frank Mason Robinson came up with the name “Coca-Cola” for the alliterative sound, which was popular among other wine medicines of the time.
  11. Although the name refers to the two main ingredients, because of controversy over its cocaine content, The Coca-Cola Company later said that the name was “meaningless but fanciful”. Robinson hand wrote the Spencerian script on the bottles and ads.
  12. Pemberton made many health claims for his product, touting it as a “valuable brain tonic” that would cure headaches, relieve exhaustion, and calm nerves, and marketed it as “delicious, refreshing, pure joy, exhilarating”, and “invigorating”.
  13. Pemberton had a hunch that his formula “some day will be a national drink”, so he attempted to retain a share of the ownership to leave to his son. In 1888, Pemberton and his son sold the remaining portion of the patent to a fellow Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Griggs Candler, for US$1,750, which in 2020 purchasing power equals about $50,000.
  14. Due to its status as an iconic brand available all around the world, you might feel like you already know all there is to know about Coca-Cola. Yes, you can drink Coke pretty much anywhere, and yes, it’s sold in more countries than there are in the United Nations. Here’s some fun facts:
  15. One of Coca-Cola’s earliest CEOs, Robert Woodruff, wanted to brand and standardize Coke served from soda fountains, so he came up with the iconic bell-shaped glass. The glasses were originally made with a mark to show exactly how much syrup to pour in for each serving.
  16. In 1923, Coca-Cola also began selling packages of six bottles, setting the precedent for the now-commonplace six-pack of today’s beverage industry.
  17. The Coca-Cola Company has, rather dramatically,hidden its secret formula in a vault since the 1920s. It also has some seriously stringent rules for viewing the document with the recipe: Only two employees can know the recipe at a time, and the company board must approve any employee just to look at the document. In 2011, the company seized on the appeal of its secrecy by making the formula vault into an exhibit at its World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta.
  18. If you’d like to spend the next nine years continually drinking different Coca-Cola beverages, feel free—with it’s 500 brands and more than 3,500 beverages, that’s how long it would take you to get through all the Coke products if you drank one per day.
  19. If every ounce of Coke ever produced was lined up in eight-ounce bottles, it could stretch to the moon and back more than 2,000 times. Now mix in other drinks – as the Coca-Cola Company produces more than just sodas, though—it manufactures everything from energy shots to soy-based drinks.
  20. With $35.1 billion in revenue in 2010, Coca-Cola represents an economy larger than some small countries; in fact, it’s bigger than Costa Rica. And if that factoid isn’t enough to shock you, consider that the Coca-Cola brand also has an estimated worth of $74 billion, which is larger than Pepsi, Starbucks, Red Bull, and Budweiser combined.
  21. In 1985 it became the first soda anyone ever drank on the moon. Coca-Cola even produced a special space can for the astronauts on the Space Shuttle Challenger.
  22. Even though the most popular use for Coke is drinking it, you can also pour it on various surfaces as a cleaning and de-rusting agent. You can even dump it on jellyfish stings to neutralize pain, bath in it to remove skunk smell, or pour it on your clothes to get rid of grease stains.
  23. Clearly, there are some unbelievable (but completely true) facts about Coca-Cola. There are, however, some myths surrounding the iconic brand that you shouldn’t pay any attention to. Some say the original drink was green, but it’s always been the same old brown. The liquid only appeared green from the green-tinted bottles and glasses it was sometimes served in. People have also claimed that Coke can dissolve objects like teeth, coins, and even steak when left in the liquid overnight. (It won’t—it will only leave those objects soggier than their original state.)
  24. In first quarter 2020, Coca Cola sold over a billion cans of sparkling and still beverages – now that’s something to smile about.

Watch Coca Cola’s ‘Have A Coke and a Smile’ 1970’s 60 second Commercial

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DO YOU LIKE CONTESTS?
Me, too.

As you may know the Kowalski Heat Treating logo finds its way
into the visuals of my Friday posts.
I.  Love.  My.  Logo.
One week there could be three logos.
The next week there could be 15 logos.
And sometimes the logo is very small or just a partial logo showing.
But there are always logos in some of the pictures.
So, I challenge you, my beloved readers, to count them and send me a quick
email with the total number of logos in the Friday post.
On the following Tuesday I’ll pick a winner from the correct answers
and send that lucky person some great KHT swag.
So, start counting and good luck!  
Oh, and the logos at the very top header don’t count.
Got it? Good.  :-))))
Have fun!!

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